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  1. #1
    Senior Member FedUpinFarmersBranch's Avatar
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    FL-2 women charged with running vast student visa fraud ring

    Posted on Thursday, 03.04.10 Recommend (3)
    2 Miami women charged with running vast student visa fraud ring
    BY ALFONSO CHARDY
    achardy@ElNuevoHerald.com

    U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have arrested two women in Miami and charged them with operating a major student visa fraud ring through which they tricked the federal government into granting more than 200 student visas to foreign nationals who were not students, agency officials and the U.S. attorney in Miami announced Thursday.

    Jeffrey H. Sloman, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, and Anthony V. Mangione, special agent in charge, ICE Office of Investigations, Miami Field Office, described the scheme at a news conference.

    An ICE media advisory called the operation the ``largest single visa fraud takedown in [the] agency's history.'' The visas involved foreign nationals fraudulently enrolled as students at Florida Language Institute, 947 SW 87th Ave., according to a grand jury indictment in the case.

    Whether foreign students show up for their assigned courses in U.S. schools became a major issue in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when federal investigators discovered some of the terrorists had student visas and did not properly use them. One of the attackers, in fact, entered the United States as a student -- but never showed up for classes in a language school in California.

    Hani Hanjour, believed to have piloted the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, carried a student visa that authorized him to study English in the United States. He landed in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Dec. 8, 2000, and told an airport passport control officer that he intended to live in Oakland, Calif., to take English-language courses. He never showed up for his courses.

    Since 9/11, immigration officials have closely monitored schools that accept foreign students to make sure those students actually show up for class and not use their visas for either terrorism or to mask illegal immigration or employment.

    In the Miami case, the grand jury indictment does not link the allegedly fake students to any terror activity -- but to possible illegal immigration.

    According to the indictment, the two defendants -- Lydia Menocal, the school's director, and Ofelia Macia, a school employee -- falsely stated that the petitions they signed were actual visa requests for foreign students.

    The papers in question were so-called forms I-20 or certificates of eligibility that enable foreign students to obtain U.S. visas. The indictment indicated that Macia and Menocal collected money from the ``students'' who then did not attend the classes. Investigators are still trying to determine what the students were really doing in the U.S.

    ``The purpose of the conspiracy,'' the indictment charged, ``was for the defendants to unjustly enrich themselves by issuing certificates of eligibility . . . necessary for foreign nationals to obtain student visas, charging the foreign nationals tuition fees for attending the Florida Language School, and falsely and fraudulently certifying on those documents that the foreign nationals would be required to take a full course of study.''

    Florida Language Institute's website, http://www.floridalanguage.com/, was not accessible. A note said: Website under maintenance.

    The indictment was filed Feb. 26 and the women were arrested Wednesday.


    http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/04/1 ... nning.html
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    Fake Students Get U.S. Visas Like 9/11 Hijackers


    Last Updated: Fri, 03/05/2010 - 4:39pm

    The U.S. government claims it restricted the nation’s fraud-infested student visa program after the 9/11 hijackers exploited it to plan their attack yet a south Florida language school has just been busted for easily tricking immigration officialsinto granting hundreds of visas to foreign nationals who posed as students.

    Practically none of the 200 foreigners who got the visas ever attended the hokey Florida Language Institute in each of the past three years and most remain at large somewhere in the U.S. Besides presenting an obvious national security threat, this violates laws enacted after the 2001 terrorist attacks to reform the notoriously unregulated and corrupt student visa program.

    Several of the 9/11 terrorists entered and lived in the U.S. with student visas and one of the attackers had enrolled—but never attended—a northern California language school similar to the one shut down by federal authorities in Florida this week. Others had enrolled at various aviation schools throughout the country.

    The State Department vowed to clean up and heavily monitor the foreign student visa program, but nearly a decade later, that clearly hasn’t occurred. Examples abound in the last few years and the most recent case in Florida illustrates the government’s deplorable negligence.

    Eighty of the fake students have been arrested by immigration authorities and will likely be deported, but at least 120 are still at large and investigators say they are trying to determine what the foreigners are doing in the U.S. They come from various countries, including Turkey, Syria, Turkmenistan, Venezuela, Indonesia, south and Central America.

    In other alarming cases, a Pakistani man indicted in Houston for aiding the Taliban and training with firearms for jihad against Americans, entered the U.S. with a student visa. He remained in the country long after the visa expired, became heavily involved in Texas Muslim groups and completed weapons and reconnaissance training at various area locations to terrorize Americans.

    In the same month an admissions clerk in the nation’s largest public university system got caught accepting bribes to fast track foreign students’ applications, many from the Middle East. The woman worked at one of the biggest schools within the California State University system, which has 23 campuses, a total enrollment of about half a million students and a faculty of 46,000.

    Who could forget when 11 young Egyptian men disappeared in 2007 after arriving in the U.S. with student visas to attend an English program in Montana? Ages 18-22, the men landed at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport before vanishing. Incompetent federal authorities downplayed the seriousness of their failure to locate the men for more than a month.

    www.judicialwatch.org
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  5. #5
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    Why Should Private, For-Profit Language Schools Authorize Visas?

    By David North, March 5, 2010

    Today's New York Times carries a story about a private-for-profit language school in Florida that "was a front for the sale of fraudulent applications for student visas."

    A total of 80 people, including the managers of the Florida Language Institute in Miami, were arrested, the Times reported.

    According to ICE, the agency in charge of the arrests, the students "rarely, if ever, attended classes".

    The scheme reportedly allowed "residents of more than a dozen countries [to] enter the United States fraudulently."

    The policy question, that the Times does not raise, is: why issue visas to people who want to study English in this country, something that can be studied anywhere in the world?

    It is one thing to offer a genuine American education to foreign students at the university and grad school levels, at genuine institutions, but why offer visas to people who want to, or say they want to, study English, or learn to be beauticians?

    The answer, of course, is the political power of the private for-profit technical schools; they have successfully urged Congress that they should have the same visa-issuing powers as Harvard and Stanford.

    While these language and beauty and other vocational schools do not actually issue visas, as suggested above, what they do is to certify papers that are usually rubber-stamped by USCIS that create approved petitions that, in turn, lead a consular officer, all too often, to convert them to nonimmigrant visas. There are F and J visas for students at what I call serious academic institutions, and M visas for those attending vocational schools. Which visas were used in this case was not reported.

    Needless to say, the proliferation of these private, sometimes fly-by-night, institutions is hard to regulate, and it should be no surprise that some of them abuse their powers. Many, in fact, run ads in overseas newspapers overseas that stress their powers to create visas well over their skills in education.

    My sense is the government is too busy to do a good job of sorting out the genuine private vocational and language schools from the phony ones. It should simply stop allowing any of them to facilitate the entry of nonimmigrant students.

    http://www.cis.org/north/vocational-schools-visas
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